1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a virtual client management system and a virtual client management method, and more specifically to a technique for performing an initial setting and other required processes for a number of deployed virtual clients easily and efficiently.
2. Related Art
Techniques have been proposed in which a plurality of virtual clients are created by software, the virtual clients are deployed on a single hypervisor, and an operating system, hereinafter also “OS,” is run on each of the virtual clients concurrently. Enterprises or the like installing, operating, and managing a great number of computers are beginning to introduce such systems, in which the above virtual clients are assigned to individual employees in place of ordinary personal computers conventionally supplied to the employees and are operated on a network for the purpose of reducing operational costs and simplifying management of computers.
This virtualization technique is drawing attention recently as an effective solution to various problems for enterprises, such as reduction of total cost of ownership, i.e., TCO, improvement of efficiency in operation/management, countermeasures in security and compliance, and business continuity plan, i.e., BCP in relation to personal computers. US Patent Application unexamined Publication No. US2008/0301487 and non-patent literature found at http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-server/overview.html propose techniques related to creation, management, and the like of a virtual client.
An information processing apparatus for performing creation and deployment of virtual clients deploys each virtual client on a hypervisor. However, this processing is performed according to instructions given manually by an administrator while the administrator refers to necessary information separately. Accordingly, the administrator sets various types of setting information for each virtual client each time, such as an static IP address, a license key of an OS, and the like required for operation of each virtual client as necessary. It has not been assumed that the above setting must be done for enormous numbers of virtual clients such as tens of thousands of virtual clients. This problem also arises in performing various kinds of processing such as updating of the OS, applying security patches, and scanning viruses in a great number of virtual clients that have started operation after their deployment.